Morton Feldman is one of the most notable and important classical composers of the 20th century. He was a pioneer of indeterminate music alongside John Cage, Christian Wolff, and Earle Brown. His musical innovations and earmarks include notational novelties that he developed to create his characteristic sound: rhythms that seem to be free and floating; pitch shadings that seem softly unfocused; a generally quiet and slowly evolving music; recurring asymmetric patterns. His later works, after 1977, also begin to explore extremes of duration. The interest in his music is huge in the past decades since his death in 1987, especially among classical pianists, but also among music theorists and scholars. The beautiful composition "For Bunita Marcus" was written 1985 as an expression of his devoted love towards Marcus. Feldman met Bunita Marcus in 1976, beginning a long association that lasted until his death in 1987. Being inseparable for seven years, they composed side by side, sharing musical thoughts and creative ideas.
I could go on combining nice words with strong metaphors and smart inversions in order to describe this work, but Feldman already did the job for us. He wrote the following statement, describing the idea behind this remarkable piece of art:
“For Bunita Marcus was untypical of my music, but I’ll tell you exactly how I wrote it, formally speaking. Not the notes; the notes didn’t write the piece. I have a talent for notes, the way some people have a talent for catching fish or for making money. I have no problems with notes. I just pull them back out of my ear – no problem at all.
For me, rhythm doesn’t exist. I would rather use the term “rhythmicize.” I started to get interested in metre; for me, at the moment when you use it, it implies the question, “How do I get beyond the bar-lines?” I wrote down 4/4, left a little space, drew a bar-line and then I wrote over that bar-line. “The black hole of metre,” because some people shouldn’t come too close to the bar-line – there is a lot of music where the style tends to pull it across the bar-line.
For Bunita Marcus mainly consists of 3/8, 5/16 and 2/2 bars. Sometimes the 2/2 had musical importance, like at the end of the piece. Sometimes the 2/2 acts as quiet, either on the right or the left or in the middle of a 3/8 or a 5/16 bar, and I used the metre as a construction – not the rhythm – the metre and the time, the duration which something needs.
What finally interested me were the “development sections,” where I was using mixed-metre. It went 2/2, 3/4, 5/8 … so I used metre up to a certain point as a period of instability. I didn’t consider it a development section where I – I can’t find a better expression – developed the metre. Then, like every other composer, I thought, how much change is possible in this grid? And I said; accelerate it or slow it down. But I couldn’t make a definitive plan – that wouldn’t work. It can only work if you go along with the material and see how it is turning out.”
